Page 106 of What's in a Kiss?

“I can’t help my reaction against nepotism. Against not doing everything on my own. Accepting Dad’s help would have meant turning into him—”

“Which you could never do,” I say, realizing this is true. It’s why Jake is estranged from his father, because he didn’t follow the family path. He chose his own way—both in this life and the one I came from. The painful beauty of this dawns on me: his choice to strike out on his own defines him. It matters more than whether Jake has the fame and fortune he has on the other side.

“Butyou’renot my father,” he says. “And I should remember that you love me for who I am, not who you want me to be—”

“I do,” I say. I take a breath. “Of course. But I still shouldn’t have said that on the yacht. I did it because...” I rest my head on his shoulder. “When I’m anxious, I fixate on solving external problems that belong to someone else. Sometimes I’ll even invent a problem, just so I can solve it. I used to feel like that was the only way I could steady myself, to be useful. But it also lets me avoid dealing with my own issues. That’s what I did to you on the yacht. And I’m sorry. The truth is, I don’t care what kind of job you have. Just like I shouldn’t care what kind of wedding Masha has or what kind of podcast my mom has. I need to let that go. Not just here, in this life, but...”

“Where else?” he asks. I shouldn’t be surprised by how closely he’s listening, but I am.

“Everywhere,” I whisper. “All the wheres in all the worlds.”

When he nods it brings tears to my eyes.

“What I’m starting to see,” I say, “is that when I start here”—I put my hand over my heart—“when I’m true to the people I love, when I show up for them honestly, that’s when I get steady. That’s when I feel right.” I take my hand out of his pocket, cup it to his cheek, the way he once cupped mine. I see in his eyes that it feels as good, as reassuring to him as it felt to me. “I feel right with you, right now.”

“I’ve felt right with you from the first moment I saw you,” he says. And then a playful glint comes into his eyes. “My first day of school at Palisades, junior year.”

“Oh, come on. That’s revisionist history.” I bump his shoulder. “It was definitely prom. Not a moment sooner. It was us on the curb, when I leaned in and kissed you—”

“First of all, as has been established,Ikissedyou.”

“Wrong!” I make a buzzer noise, energized by this little spat. I’ve missed fighting with him. We’re kind of awesome at it. “I have proof. Documentation in diary form.”

“Yeah, well, I see your diary,” he taunts, “and raise you one meticulously detailed Moleskine journal.”

“You do not have a Moleskine—”

“Third drawer of my desk in the office. You think you’re the only one who writes? My account goes all the way back to my first day at school, the first time I saw the first girl I’d ever fall in love with. And it includes the truth about what happened at the audition forRomeo and Juliet.”

I stare at him, trying to gauge whether he’s messing with me. I know which moment changed the course of my life, and it was that kiss at prom. It’s the demarcation point between Real Life and High Life. That Jake had feelings for mebeforethen doesn’t seem possible. Yes, he referenced the audition when he was stuck up in the palm tree, but I didn’t know enough then to believe him. I want to argue this point further, but then—if he really did keep his own written version of events, am I supposed to know about it? Have Ireadit?

I tell myself to stop worrying about what I’m supposed to know in this life. The details of our past aren’t real anyway. Or at least they won’t be when I go home.

“Jake?”

“Yes?”

“If we’d never kissed at prom, if you’d leaned away—”

“You mean if you’d leaned away?”

“If one of us had leaned away, and we never got together—if we spent these past ten years apart, where do you think you’d be now?”

He considers this a moment, staring at the sea. He takes a long time answering, and I can’t tell if the question annoys him. But then slowly, seriously, he says, “I think I would be living far away from you. I think I would have needed that distance between us, thinking it would let me move on.”

“New York?” I say.

“Probably.” He nods. “But it would have been useless. I wouldn’t have moved on. I’d probably be channeling all that energy into some job, who knows what. Maybe it would make me successful. But I wouldn’t be happy. I’d be dating the wrongperson and realizing right about now the relationship would never work in the long run.”

“Why not?” I say.

Jake turns from the sea to fix his gaze on me. He takes my hand. “Because there is only one long run for me. There only ever has been one. If we’d never gotten together, if we’d spent these ten years apart, I’d be making my way back to you now. I’d do anything to get another chance.”

I try to see him as Glasswell, getting into my Lyft at LAX. He’s the same person, but he isn’t. And as beautiful as his idea of us is—that our love is inevitable—I’m the one who knows it didn’t turn out that way in Real Life.

“The question is,” he says, “if we’d spent the past ten years apart, and I came to you and told you the biggest mistake I ever made was not kissing you at prom, what would you do?”

I swallow the sob rising in my chest. “Luckily,” I say, “we’ll never have to worry about that.”

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